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Walnut desk and bookcase in two parts. The upper case features a tall, broad cornice, two blind doors, and three small locking drawers. The hinged writing surface of the lower case is supported by two lopers with hand-carved ends. Two of the three lower drawers feature turned walnut pulls. The drawers are flanked by scrolls that terminate in the curved front feet. The back feet are turned.

History

The curved overhanging upper drawer and scrolled shapes flanking the lower drawers of this desk are characteristic of American furniture in the empire or late neoclassical style, first popularized in the eastern United States in the 1820s; variations on this style persisted into the mid-nineteenth century. According to the Elmbrook Historical Society, this desk and bookcase was constructed by Lowell Damon for local farmer C. W. Fisher. Born in New Hampshire in 1808, Lowell Damon arrived in Wauwatosa, Milwaukee County in 1846. The Damons' home, completed in 1849, is now an historic site operated by the Milwaukee County Historical Society. In a 1935 Milwaukee Journal feature on the home, Damon is described as a “skilled cabinetmaker and wheelwright” who, upon settling in Wisconsin, “at once set about practising his trade.”

Sources

“Bit of New England in Wauwatosa,” Milwaukee Journal, July 18, 1935, from the Wisconsin Historical Society's Wisconsin Local History and Biography Articles: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wlhba/articleView.asp?pg=1&id=14066 For more on empire or late classical revival furniture in the United States, see Donald L. Fennimore, "Fine Points of American Empire: Late, Later, Latest" in Victorian Furniture, ed. Kenneth L. Ames (Philadelphia: The Victorian Society in America, 1983); Wendy A. Cooper, Classical Taste in America (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993); Rosemary Troy Krill, Early American Decorative Arts 1620-1860 (AltaMira Press, 2001).